To address global poverty - do we really not have enough resources or do we not have the right tools to allocate our resources?
The tools of finance, when applied correctly, can be an enabler of social and environmental outcomes. This course is designed to give you the ability to build innovative financing strategies that work towards outcomes such as financial inclusion, access to energy and access to education. The innovative finance process has five key components. It starts with identifying the outcomes you are looking to achieve and next moves on to due diligencing your issue area using techniques like design thinking to make sure you are designing with the end user. Next you must map all of the resources available for your outcome and then discover opportunities to augment these through business model innovation, multi-stakeholder partnerships and innovative financial structures. Finally, the last step is to put all of these pieces together to design an innovating financing strategy.
Each week dives into a component of the process using examples and real case studies from social entrepreneurs, non-profits, development funders, impact investors, governments, foundations and more. Over five weeks you’ll learn about new types of revenue creation, financing approaches, business models and partnerships. By the end of the course, you’ll have the ability to hack finance for social change.
Watch the course trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSMUoCJgqkw

From the lesson

Understanding Challenges and Roadblocks

This week we are going to look at how you assess the needs, challenges and roadblocks in your issue area. You’ll be introduced to Due Diligence, an essential process that needs to be undertaken to map the problem and solutions landscape of an issue area. Following this, we cover design thinking - a useful tool that can be used when conducting due diligence. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the user perspective when mapping problems and potential solutions. Once we’ve understood the concepts, our case studies explain their approaches to due diligence and impact measurement. For this week’s assignment, you’ll need to pick your issue area and outcome metrics as well as design an engagement plan.